In the metropolitan world of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, poverty presents itself at every corner and it is common to see burros and cattle in the streets. / Photo courtesy of David Jal

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Reporter Steve Young talks about his recent trip t...: Argus Leader reporter Steve Young and editor Patrick Lalley talk about Young's recent trip to Sudan and the series of stories being published after the trip.

A boy crosses the Khor Wakow River near Dunyal village in South Sudan with a bull in tow. The river is the source of drinking water for the village but is tainted by animal and human waste. A fresh source of water would help cut illness in the village. / Photo courtesy of David Jal

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ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — She appeared from the shadows, a wisp of a girl maybe 5 years old with short brown, braided hair and those dark, pleading eyes.

“Gah-she,” she kept repeating, calling me “mister” in her native Arabic and hanging on my right elbow as we moved down the busy street in the Ethiopian capital. “Hungry, Gah-she, hungry.”

Whether she pegged me as a good Samaritan or just an easy mark, who knows? But in her olive-colored vest, her dark pants and lime-green sandals, she wasn’t somebody I had ever encountered on the streets of Sioux Falls.

This child was beautiful yet heart-wrenching — and begging me to feed her.

Getting ready to travel to South Sudan to write about Sioux Falls probation officer David Jal and his plans to dig a well and build a school in his native village of Dunyal took some preparation. You get all the necessary malaria and yellow fever inoculations. You search the Internet and know this part of Africa gets to 110 degrees in February. You swap stories with other locals who have traveled to remote parts of the world and understand that you better pack toilet paper and Power Bars and mosquito netting and pills for the diarrhea when it comes.

And it will come.

Still, for all of its modern splendor compared to the bush and mud huts we would visit in rural South Sudan, Addis Ababa still revealed things to me my mind hadn’t taken into account.

Poor line the streets

One of the most startling images was the vastness of the poverty, and the fact that it was so public. Masses of people — mainly women and children — lined the streets, peddling chewing gum or phone cards or mangos. Two or three young boys stood on every corner, the creams in their shoeshine boxes not nearly as smooth as the practiced polish in their salesman’s pitch.

Those with nothing to sell maneuvered for the few patches of shade, maybe a concrete structure to rest against, and simply held out their hands. At one curbside, while we waited in a van to be transported to a nearby market, a man appeared at the door missing half his body. Balancing himself with his hands and gazing up from the gutter, he pleaded for anyone inside to help him out with a few coins, maybe a dollar.

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Instead, an impatient van driver barked at him in Arabic and brusquely shut the door. As we pulled away, I watched him walking crab-like along the gutter to the next parked vehicle, like an attraction in some circus freak show.

Those kinds of images were far less common than all the children we saw with cleft palates, or all the adults with eyes whose pupils had disappeared into orangish-white masses because of untreated inflammations and disease.

We were sitting in a mud hut at the home of Jal’s mother, trying to escape the heat one afternoon in Gambela, Ethiopia, and a woman who is like an aunt to Jal was telling a story about a white eye doctor who had come to town recently and was treating the locals.

They were shining a flashlight into people’s eyes, she told Jal in their native Nuer. “If your eye blinks,” she said, “they know your eyes are all right and sign you up for another appointment. If they don’t blink, they know your eyes are dead and kick you out.”

They laughed. “The way she told it,” Jal explains later, “was funny.”

In the eastern part of South Sudan where we spent much of our time, you rarely saw anybody wearing glasses — a reflection, obviously, of the lack of eye care in that part of the world. I didn’t see one adult who had all of his or her teeth, either. The only toothbrushes being used were crafted from tree twigs.

Dangerous drivers in city

The other unnerving and unexpected reality of life in Addis Ababa was the driving of motorists. There are no apparent traffic laws or pedestrian rights. We traveled with a taxi driver named Akeberegh who barreled down streets at 60 mph, veered across lanes for no obvious reason, and leaned constantly on his horn warning to walkers and motorists to stay out of his way.

That was common for most drivers.

We were going to visit Jal’s sister, Nyaboth, one evening and weaving wildly through traffic when we ended up rear-ending another taxi that had abruptly stopped.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm was not there and wasn’t even called. Instead, the two drivers got out, snarled at each other in Arabic while gesturing angrily, then got back in their vehicles and went their separate ways. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but at least we understood now why every taxi we ever saw in the Ethiopian capital had at least one major dent in it.

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The reality is, it’s a world of dents over there — both cars and people — revealed in crumpled fenders and diseased eyes and a prevalence of deformities that we almost never see back here on the prairie.

The memories linger

It is an unexpectedly haunting world of poverty, too — from the mother who stood nursing her child while begging for money near our hotel in Addis Ababa to the 12-year-old boy who would not take “no” for an answer as he leaned into the window of our bus and brashly insisted on something, anything.

“I want to take your picture first,” I finally told him. When he readily agreed, I snapped his photo and gave him 10 times what he was asking — a 10-birr Ethiopian note that was worth 60 cents in American currency.

And the beautiful little girl who followed at my elbow for two blocks, insisting that one birr would buy her a piece of bread? Jal eventually stopped, peeled a bill out of the folded currency in his pocket and handed it to her.

You can’t help everybody; we just didn’t bring enough money, he told me later. But something about her tugged as strongly at him as it did at me.

With the money in her little hand, she disappeared into the shadows again, the words, “hungry, Gah-she, hungry,” still echoing in my ears, and her face now a memory I never can forget.